Rave: The Fresh 20

About 1.5 years ago, I read an article about President Obama and how he makes so many huge, life changing decisions every day.  The article was fascinating, but what I got out of it most was that when he became president, he limited the number of every day decisions he had to make in order to clear up space in his head to make all the important decisions. 

Chris and I were spending 15-20 min every single night deciding what to eat, and too many times we would just end up grabbing food or going out.  As part of my health goal last year, I wanted to eat and cook healthier.  So we started meal planning on a monthly basis using a white board calendar.  We spent 20 min one Sunday a month and planned the entire month of dinners.  We chose the main meal for dinner and I would base my grocery shopping off what we were having.  We had to make up the sides on the fly, but for dinner we had a protein and two vegetables, so it was fairly easy.

We learned a lot, tried a lot of new meals, and we were fairly successful at reducing the times we would go out to eat.  However, I found myself overwhelmed with grocery shopping.  It was taking way too long - 2 stores for about 60-90 min each store, mostly because I wandered around.  It also made me ill and left me highly frustrated how often we were throwing away food.  It was very bothersome because we were spending close to $1200 a month on grocery shopping (meals, lunches, snacks, toiletries, pet care), only to turn around and throw most of it away every week.

As part of our goal this year, we set out to focus on personal finance.  We have created a budget and work hard to stick to it.  One of the items I really wanted to target was our grocery bill, because I felt it was very unreasonable, plus we wasted a significant amount of food.

A couple months ago, I heard about The Fresh 20 Meal Planning site.  It sounded too good to be true, honestly.  For about $1/week, my weekly dinner meals would be planned (full meal, including sides) with 20 fresh, in-season ingredients, with the intent of reducing waste.  My grocery list would be automatically generated, nutrition information provided, and both the grocery shopping trip time and bill would be reduced.

So does it work?  A resounding, absolute YES.

Somebody else thinks about the meals and plans a week’s worth of menus to reduce waste.  I reuse the ingredients in a new way throughout the week.  This means I spend time preparing items the first night and then re-use them on the 3rd night for something completely different.  This also means that the prep time can be as fast as 15 min.  The longest prep time has been 1 hour.

The food is delicious, healthy, and filling.  We have 3 meat/chicken meals, 1 seafood, and 1 vegetarian meal a week.  We’ve never eaten vegetarian meals, prior to this menu and we have also learned how to make different kinds of seafood.  Not every meal is a hit and we’ve only had one meal not edible – we realized we don’t like chipotle peppers!  We haven’t had the same thing twice.

We paid for the year subscription, which comes out to about $1/week.  We did this to get access to the archives, so that if we don’t like a menu one week, we just pull one from the prior year’s archives.  And our grocery bill?  We spend ~$100-$130/week on dinners, lunches, and snacks.  We spend another $200/month on pet care and toiletries.  This means our total grocery bill has been nearly cut in half.

And grocery shopping?  I go to one store and I am in and out in about 30 min.  The grocery list tells me exactly how much to buy of each item (pounds, ounces, number, etc) and it’s organized by how the grocery store is set up.  I don’t wander around and I have become more familiar with new kinds of produce, utilizing the butcher counter, and even trying new kinds of cheese.

I HIGHLY recommend The Fresh 20 meal plan.  And for those of you with special diets, they have: Vegetarian, Gluten Free, Dairy Free, Kosher and For One.  We do the classic menu.